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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > September > 12 > Entry
Testing little kids
Here’s another nugget from the early childhood education seminar I went to in Chicago over the weekend.
There’s a huge national push underway to open preschool to more kids. States are spending a lot more money, with Georgia and Okahoma leading the way by instituting “universal” preschool for 4-year-olds. That means the state will pay for your four-year-old to attend preschool.
This could quickly become a sticky situation. If states fund preschool on a large scale, how long before it becomes required, much as kindergarten has? In a few years, will school just start at age 4? Already we’ve seen kindergarten transformed into a much more academic environment thanks to the pressure on schools to produce good test scores. Could this effort push testing and pressure for academic instruction down to these tiny kids? It’s a good bet.
At the seminar, Sam Meisels of the Erikson Institute, a child development graduate school in Chicago, showed test questions from a national test meant to provide data about four- and five-year-olds. Meisels showed how very flawed these questions were — that they were developmentally inappropriate, asking kids to do things they simply are unprepared to do, or just poorly worded and designed.
For one question, teachers are instructed to ask kids which of four pictures is a vase. The teacher is explicitly told to pronounce the word “vaze” so it rhymes with Oz. But many kids know the word as “vace” so it rhymes with ace. And the four pictures include a wine decanter, a trophy, a canister and a vase that looks like an urn, all drawn in black ink with no color.
Meisels thinks this is asking a lot of a four year old. He pointed out that he has probably used each of those objects as a vase in his life.
There’s another question where kids are supposed to point out which of four faces is “horrified.” Two of the faces seemed to be recoiling in distress. If a kid even knew the word “horrified,” they’d likely have a hard time choosing.
Meisels is on the “technical committee” for this test. That means he and others are supposed to be consulted in the test making process. But instead, Meisel said they were essentially handed a finished test and asked to sign off. His warnings about some of the questions went unheeded. This is another common problem in test creation. Test makers say they consult experts while building the tests, but many times those experts are mostly left out of the process.
The test was so bad, that its results were discounted by the federal government’s General Accounting Office as not “valid measures of the learning that takes place in head start.”
Bad test with poor and misleading questions are a problem up and down the standardized testing spectrum, as Mark Fisher and I reported last year in our series “Flunking the Test.” In particular, Meisel’s critique called to mind this story we wrote about overly tricky test questions on Ohio tests. (If you look at the series, be sure to check out this fun story too.)
When you look at actual standardized test questions, you can’t help but wonder if we can really trust the data we get from them — data we use to make all sorts of judgments about kids, schools and learning.
And soon, we could be pushing this system down on preschoolers.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Testing, Young Children
Comments
By wheels
September 13, 2005 9:42 AM | Link to this
I think that pre-school is a great environment for kids to learn social skills - things like don’t push in line, keep your hands to yourself, and don’t invade others personal space. These are skills that are vital to success in school, but more and more often are becoming overlooked as pre-school’s focus on “academics”. I wonder what is going to happen to our four year olds if we continue to push academics on them in preschool?